Ne Tentes aut Perfice Early Hawaiian Diplomacy in the Southwestern Pacific and the Creation of Hawai‘i’s First Royal Order

Introduction

In early 1860, King Kamehameha IV granted royal assent to the Order of Arossi, an order “for the reward of those who have materially aided the Social and Political Advancement of any Polynesian Government or People.”¹ The monarch thereby created the first Hawaiian royal order, preceding by several years King Kamehameha V’s 1865 creation of the Royal Order of Kamehameha I, which is commonly assumed to be the first such order.² Unlike the later Hawaiian royal orders created by Kamehameha V and Kalākaua, however, the Order of Arossi—named after a place in the Solomon Islands—was not conceived of in the Hawaiian Islands but thousands of miles away in what was then the British colony of New South Wales, by a group of diplomats representing the Hawaiian Kingdom in Sydney. While none of them were of Hawaiian ancestry, and only one of them would set foot in Hawai‘i later in his life, the creators of the Order of Arossi played an important role in connecting the Hawaiian Islands not only to the Australian colonies but also to the archipelagos of the Southwestern Pacific. Furthermore, their Sydney office formed the nexus for the spread of the Hawaiian constitution as a model for other island kingdoms to emulate, and their activities, symbolized by the Order of Arossi, also laid the groundwork for Hawai‘i’s pan-Oceanianist foreign policy as it would be espoused especially under the reign of King Kalākaua during the mid-1880s.

This article provides a background to the origin of this first Hawaiian Royal Order by highlighting the roles played by Hawai‘i’s diplomatic and consular representatives in the Southwestern Pacific in shaping Hawaiian policy towards Oceania. It will first provide some context of the development of Hawai‘i’s diplomatic and consular network and the individuals involved, with a specific emphasis on the Southwestern Pacific. The article then focuses on the two central figures in this regional diplomatic network, Charles St Julian and Edward Reeve, whose motivations and passions for their work differed from most other consular personnel. Having introduced the main protagonists who conceived of the Order of Arossi, our attention will then turn to the peculiar circumstances of its creation, namely a quite extraordinary story of failed British settler adventurism in the Solomon Islands upon which a Hawaiian connection was later grafted. Continuing the story of the expanding Hawaiian consular network in the Southwestern Pacific during the 1870s and 1880s, it concludes with an assessment of the network’s contributions to the Hawaiian Kingdom’s larger pan-Oceanian policy, including a critical evaluation of the individuals involved.

Hawaiian Diplomatic and Consular Representation Abroad

In the nineteenth century world order, the Hawaiian Kingdom had a unique status. In 1843 it became the first non-Western nation that received full recognition as an independent state by the Western powers.³ Subsequently, Hawai‘i established equal treaty relations with almost every single Western nation. This made Hawai‘i unique among non-Western nations, as the European powers had not only not colonized the Islands but recognized them as one of their equals, a status they would deny all other Pacific islands, but also Japan until 1899 and China until as late as the mid-twentieth century.⁴

Secondly, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Hawaiian Islands had become a hub for the trans-Pacific trade between the Americas and Asia. As early as in 1801, French scholar Charles Pierre Claret de Fleurieu had predicted that Hawai‘i would become the “caravansary of the Pacific”⁵ and by the time the kingdom started modernizing its political structure in the 1840s during Kamehameha III’s rule, Honolulu had definitely become “a center, rather than a periphery, of the Pacific World.”⁶ It was in the context of these expanding trade relations that the Hawaiian Kingdom established a wide range of consulates and consular agencies around the world, starting in 1850. The driving force behind those appointments was Hawai‘i’s first minister of foreign affairs, Scottish-born Robert Crichton Wyllie (1798-1865) appointed by Kamehameha III in 1846⁷ and retained in office by Kamehameha IV and V until his death in 1865, who could tap into a global network of mainly British friends and business associates that he had established during his time as merchant in Europe and Latin America before coming to Hawai‘i in 1844.⁸ Hawai‘i subsequently had a marked presence on the world stage, and by the late 1880s, the island kingdom had over a hundred diplomatic and consular agents positioned around the world.⁹

The first academic work specifically examining Hawaiian consular representation abroad was published recently by Nicholas B. Miller.¹⁰ Despite a number of technical and factual errors, Miller is correct in stating that many, if not most, of Hawaiian consular appointments were made to locally resident businessmen whose interest was primarily economic, and whose main contributions were to facilitate trade with or the recruitment of labor to Hawai‘i. They had no other specific ties to Hawai‘i, and often concurrently acted as consuls for other countries as well.¹¹ However, Miller also mentions another type of resident diplomatic or consular agents whose commitment to the Hawaiian Kingdom was much deeper. They had either lived in Hawai‘i and became naturalized subjects there, like the long-serving Hawaiian Chargé d’Affaires in London Abraham Hoffnung,¹² or—not mentioned by Miller—they were born in Hawai‘i of foreign ancestry like Hawai‘i’s long-term minister resident in Washington, DC, Henry A. P. Carter, ¹³ or even of ‘Ōiwi (native) ancestry like John Kapilikea Sumner who served as Hawaiian consul in Tahiti from 1881 to 1885.¹⁴

As far as the Southwestern Pacific was concerned, Hawai‘i’s initial consular representatives there certainly fit the first category. The first Hawaiian Consul-General in Sydney, Thomas Winder Campbell, received his commission in 1850 because of a friend and business associate, Scottish entrepreneur and adventurer Benjamin Boyd, who was also acquainted with Wyllie and recommended Campbell’s appointment to the Hawaiian foreign minister. Boyd was at the time passing through Honolulu on his yacht Wanderer,¹⁵ a fateful trip that would play a key role in the origins of the Order of Arossi, as we will see below.

Around the same time, Wyllie also had merchant John Watson Bain, with whom he had previously corresponded by mail, appointed Hawaiian consul in Auckland, New Zealand,¹⁶ and a few years later, American trader in Apia Virginius P. Chapin was commissioned as Hawaiian commercial and consular agent for Sāmoa.¹⁷ While of these earliest appointments Chapin—concurrently also commercial agent for the United States—remained in office until his departure from Sāmoa to the United States in 1856,¹⁸ and Bain—simultaneously also US consular agent—until his death in 1867,¹⁹ Campbell proved unreliable to fulfill his duties as Hawaiian consul general in Sydney, a higher ranking position that was supposed to be the nexus for Hawaiian activity in the region.²⁰

Hawai‘i’s Passionate Advocates: Charles St Julian and Edward Reeve

Campbell’s poor performance opened the doors for arguably one of the most remarkable figures in Hawaiian diplomatic history²¹ to enter the stage: A few years earlier, in 1848, a young Sydney-based newspaperman by the name of Charles St Julian had contacted James J. Jarves, the US-born editor of the Hawaiian English-language government newspaper The Polynesian and suggested closer commercial and political ties between the Hawaiian Islands and the Australian colonies, including the establishment of a Hawaiian consulate in Sydney, since he had repeatedly noticed stranded Hawaiian sailors in need of consular assistance.²²

During the late 1840s and early 1850s, the Australian colonies—essentially New South Wales at the time, with most other colonial outposts along the continent’s coast only in their initial settlement stages—were in a process of social change from a penal colony to a commerce-based settler colony. In the process, the commercial elite among the free settlers became increasingly assertive, with self-government being granted to New South Wales in 1856 and started to develop its own local “sub-imperial” ambitions towards the Pacific Islands.²³

It was in this context that St Julian had become interested in the insular Pacific, albeit with a somewhat different angle from that of Sydney’s merchant class. While Australia’s expanding trade and was mainly with the islands of central Polynesia, and much less with the Hawaiian Islands, Hawai‘i’s position as the only island nation with an internationally recognized government, as well as its more developed capitalist economy compared to the rest of Oceania, was not lost on St Julian. After exhaustive research, he wrote a series of articles for various Sydney newspapers, later publishing them in book form as Notes on the Latent Resources of Polynesia in 1851, in which he concluded, among other things, that “[t]he Hawaiian nation may, as a whole, be fairly appealed to as affording a proof of what the Polynesian race is capable of.”²⁴

St Julian now once more contacted Honolulu and sent a copy of his book to Wyllie, initiating an intensive and constructive dialogue between the two that lasted for almost a decade, in which St Julian developed the idea that all of Polynesia should be united into a large political entity led by its most powerful state, the Hawaiian Kingdom. These ideas impressed upon Wyllie, and in 1853 Kamehameha III appointed St Julian as Hawai‘i’s Commissioner, and Political and Commercial Agent, to the independent islands of the Pacific.²⁵ Initially his position remained parallel to Campbell’s as Consul-General, but when the latter departed to Britain in 1855, St Julian took charge of the Hawaiian Consulate-General for New South Wales and Tasmania as well.²⁶ A year earlier, St Julian had appointed his associate Edward Reeve, a writer and government clerk, to be chancellor of the Hawaiian Commission to the Independent Islands in the Pacific.²⁷ Reeve remained St Julian’s most active collaborator and would eventually succeed him in office in 1872.

With the appointment of St Julian, the Hawaiian commission and consulate-general in Sydney took a new direction, from a business orientation towards one of active and increasingly visionary policy-making. For despite never having visited Hawai‘i in their lifetimes, St Julian and Reeve clearly belong to the second category of Hawaiian officials abroad, whose connection to the Kingdom was deeper. Their diplomatic work for Hawai‘i was driven by deep personal passion, not by business interests, and they never served as consuls for another power concurrently.

Figure 1.

Portrait of Charles St Julian (1819–1874). St Julian is wearing the robe of the Chief Justice of the Kingdom of Fiji and the insignia of Knight’s Commander of the Royal Order of Kamehameha I. Engraving published in the Illustrated Sydney News, January 16, 1875, based on a photograph or sketch done between 1872 and 1874. Engraver and photographer unknown.

Born in England in 1819, St Julian arrived in Sydney in 1839, settled down and founded a family. Talented as a writer, as well as quick to understand law and politics, he became a leading journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald, writing mainly as a court reporter but also on a variety of social and political topics. Within the political spectrum of colonial New South Wales, he positioned himself as a liberal and moderate advocate of social reforms, but at the same time opposed to more radical political reform movements, such as republicanism, and ardently defended the system of constitutional monarchy against such critics.²⁸ Later, during the 1860s, St Julian became actively involved in New South Wales local politics and served in various municipal governments in the suburbs of Sydney.²⁹ While his positions as news-paperman, diplomat and local politician gave him social status, they were apparently not very remunerative, as he twice faced insolvency proceedings in 1849 and 1862.³⁰

In his diplomatic capacity, besides his everyday responsibilities of issuing passports and helping Hawaiian subjects in need of assistance,³¹ St Julian made it his personal ambition to increase the Hawaiian Kingdom’s sphere of influence throughout the Pacific, disseminate knowledge about Hawai‘i among the other island rulers and vice versa, and promote the Hawaiian Kingdom’s constitution as a model for them to follow. It was in consequence of these initiatives that the nineteenth-century constitutions of Fiji, Tonga and Sāmoa all bear strong resemblance to that of Hawai‘i. The idea of bringing immigrants from the other islands of Oceania to the kingdom was also first contemplated at the time.³²

After four years in Hawaiian diplomatic service, St Julian published his second book in 1857, an Official Report on Central Polynesia presented to the Hawaiian Government, which contained a detailed gazetteer of all Central Polynesian islands and chiefdoms, compiled by Reeve. In the report, St Julian reiterated and refined his vision of a Polynesia modernized along Hawaiian lines and unified under Hawaiian primacy.³³ Two years later, his Hawaiian diplomatic appointment was renewed, and he received a commission as Chargé d’Affaires and Consul General from Kamehameha IV.³⁴

When Wyllie passed away in 1865, the Hawaiian government became less wholehearted in its support for St Julian, and during most of the 1860s there was little communication between Honolulu and its legation in Sydney. After Kamehameha V appointed Charles C. Harris foreign minister in 1869, however, Honolulu renewed its political support for St Julian, and sent him on a diplomatic mission to Levuka, the capital of Fiji, in 1871, his first actual voyage to any Pacific island.³⁵ Fiji had then recently formed a constitutional monarchy under King Cakobau based on the Hawaiian model, and St Julian’s mission was to assess the feasibility of a possible Hawaiian protectorate over Fiji³⁶ Nothing came of that particular project, but his impressions in Levuka made him an ardent advocate of the new Fijian government, and on his return to Sydney he published a pamphlet urging the international recognition of Fiji’s sovereignty.³⁷

This endeared him to Cakobau and his advisors, who offered him an appointment as Chief Justice and Chancellor of the Kingdom of Fiji in 1872. He resigned his Hawaiian diplomatic commission and took the position that made him the second-highest official in Fiji, and he represented King Cakobau when reading the King’s speeches at the opening of the Fijian legislature in the latter’s absence in 1872 and 1873.³⁸ However, after a few years, due to internal instability, settler racism, and foreign power hostility, the Fijian Kingdom ended up being annexed by Great Britain in October of 1874. Soon thereafter, St Julian’s visionary life ended rather tragically when he was not rehired by the incoming colonial administration and passed away on November 26, 1874 in Levuka.³⁹

St Julian’s life, ideas and contribution to Hawaiian policy have been extensively documented in previous work on nineteenth century Hawaiian pan-Oceanianism, including by the present author.⁴⁰ Furthermore, a short biographical piece as well as a volume-long biography, based on an earlier doctoral dissertation, have been published on this foremost Hawaiian diplomat in Australia.⁴¹ Much less has been written about St, Julian’s faithful assistant and later successor in office, Edward Reeve, besides several contemporary news articles⁴² and a relatively extensive entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which however mentions his role as a Hawaiian diplomat only in a brief passage.⁴³ This comparative lack of interest in Reeve does not do justice to the important contributions done by this equally fascinating diplomatic official, both under St Julian’s direction and independently afterwards.

Much more than the more practically inclined St Julian, Reeve was an intellectual. Born in England in 1822, he had attended Bristol College and came to Sydney in 1840.⁴⁴ Initially working as a schoolteacher, then as a government clerk in the New South Wales immigration and Police departments, Reeve eventually found work as a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald in 1854.⁴⁵ It is likely that he became acquainted with fellow journalist St Julian in that context, as the latter shortly thereafter appointed Reeve chancellor of the Hawaiian commission. In that capacity, Reeve worked very hard for the Hawaiian Kingdom, as many of St Julian’s dispatches are in Reeve’s handwriting and he often co-signed official acts of the Hawaiian diplomatic mission.⁴⁶

Figure 2.

Portrait of Edward Reeve (1822–1889) wearing the insignia of Knight’s Commander of the Royal Order of Kalākaua. Hand colored photograph by Freeman (first name unknown), dated around 1879. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

One of his most important contributions to the Hawaiian commission was doubtlessly the “Gazetteer of Central Polynesia” that he compiled and published as an attachment to St Julian’s 1857 Report on Central Polynesia mentioned above. Containing entries for hundreds of islands with a variety of statistical and historical information on each of them, the gazetteer can be regarded as one of the most detailed compilations of knowledge of the Pacific Islands available during the mid-nineteenth century.⁴⁷

Reeve’s talents as a researcher, evidenced in the gazetteer as well as his classical education at Bristol College, convinced the University of Sydney to appoint him the first curator of their newly founded Museum of Antiquities—now called the Nicholson Museum and to this day the largest museum of classical antiquities in the Southern hemisphere—in 1860.⁴⁸ In this context, his passion for meticulous compilation of knowledge was once again displayed in 1870, when he published an extensive catalogue of the museum’s hundreds of ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman objects, showcasing his knowledge of the ancient Mediterranean world and of the Greek and Latin languages.⁴⁹ Already a decade earlier, reflecting on his initial career as a schoolteacher, Reeve had published a pamphlet on education.⁵⁰

Furthermore, being a true ‘renaissance man,’ Reeve was also active as a poet and playwright. Among his contributions to the Sydney Morning Herald and other Sydney newspapers were various works of fiction and literary criticism. One of his plays, a Shakespearean-style tragedy set in medieval Italy, was published as a book in 1851⁵¹ and publicly performed in Sydney in 1863, and the body of creative writing he produced made him famous enough to be listed in standard works on Australian literature.⁵² In 1871, he founded the New South Wales Academy of Arts to provide a forum for similarly minded individuals sensitive to the arts, a rather rare occurrence in the mostly utilitarian-oriented world of Anglo-Saxon settlers.⁵³

When St Julian resigned his Hawaiian commission to become Chief Justice of Fiji in mid-1872, Reeve succeeded him in office and was duly commissioned by King Kamehameha V.⁵⁴ Unfortunately, however, after Kamehameha V’s death in late 1872, Hawai‘i’s new foreign minister Charles Reed Bishop, serving under the new king Lunalilo, had no interest in furthering Hawaiian involvement in Oceania and refused to sanction Reeve’s succession as Hawaiian Chargé d’Affaires

Figure 3.

The building at 163 Bourke Street in Sydney, location of the Hawaiian Consulate-General during Reeve’s tenure between 1872 and 1875. Photo by the author, taken in December 2019.

to Central Polynesia, eventually closing down the legation in February of 1873, in order to “end all that Polynesia business once and for all,” as historian Jason Horn succinctly paraphrased it.⁵⁵ Reeve’s rank remained limited to being Hawaiian consul-general to the Australian colonies, over his vigorous protests.⁵⁶ In late 1874, he undertook his only documented trip to a Pacific Island, when he was present during the annexation of Fiji by Great Britain.⁵⁷

In 1875, for reasons of failing health, Reeve resigned from his journalistic and curatorial jobs in Sydney and moved to the small town of Gosford, about 30 miles to the north, were he served as police magistrate and coroner.⁵⁸ While becoming a pillar of the small rural settler community away from hectic city life,⁵⁹ he retained his position of Hawaiian Consul-general and continued regular correspondence with Honolulu, until he tended his resignation in early 1879, following a British government decision forbidding its civil servants to serve as consuls for foreign states.⁶⁰ Nonetheless he offered to be informally at the Hawaiian government’s disposal and continued to write several letters informing Honolulu of political events in the Pacific Islands.⁶¹ In 1888, Reeve retired on a government pension and moved back to Sydney, where he briefly resumed the curatorship of the Museum of Antiquities before passing away on May 13, 1889.⁶²

Creating a Network of Hawaiian Consulates in Australia and the Islands

Being a passionate advocate of the Hawaiian Kingdom, St Julian began building a network of Hawaiian consulates in the Australian colonies and the Islands of the Southwestern Pacific right after receiving his appointment in 1853. In Sydney itself, St Julian’s office was initially staffed with fellow newspaperman Edward Wilbraham Bell as Chancellor of the Commission, but he passed away soon and was replaced with Reeve in 1854.⁶³ In 1859 the Hawaiian diplomatic mission in Sydney was further extended to include Alexander Speed Webster, a Sydney-based merchant originally from Scotland, as vice-consul.⁶⁴ As early as 1854, the network was extended outside of Sydney through the appointment of John Walden Semple, as agent of the Hawaiian Commission in Melbourne.⁶⁵ However, because of political differences with St Julian, Semple’s appointment was revoked the following

Figure 4.

Map of the Southwestern Pacific, highlighting Hawaiian consular posts and other place names mentioned in the article. Map drawn by the author.

year.⁶⁶ The second Hawaiian consular appointment in another Australian colony was that of artist and merchant William Knight, likely an acquaintance of Reeves through his network of artists and writers, as Hawaiian consul in Hobart, Tasmania.⁶⁷ Finally, in 1859, Albert Maxwell Hutchison was appointed Hawaiian consular agent in Newcastle, a port city in New South Wales north of Sydney.⁶⁸

Throughout the 1850s, St Julian and Reeve appointed further consuls in Southwestern Oceania. The first of them was Alexander Blake, a British-born assistant to the Wesleyan missionaries in Tonga who worked at their printing press on the island of Vava‘u in the northern part of the archipelago.⁶⁹ When Blake visited Sydney in 1855, St

Figure 5.

Painting of Alexander Blake by his descendant, Gabriella Renee Blake-‘Ilolahia, ca. 2016. Facial features reconstructed by the artist based on contemporary descriptions and features common among his descendants. No surviving photograph of Blake is known to exist. Reproduction courtesy of Gabriella Renee Blake-‘Ilolahia.

Julian appointed him Hawaiian Consul to the “United Sovereignties of Tonga, Haabai [Ha ‘apai] and Vavau [Vava‘u],” as the Tongan Kingdom was then referred to.⁷⁰ He subsequently played an important role as an intermediary in the correspondence between St Julian and King George Tupou I of Tonga.⁷¹ In 1857, Blake’s appointment was confirmed by Kamehameha IV⁷² and he remained the first and only foreign consul in Tonga until his death in Nuku‘alofa in the early 1860s.⁷³

In Sāmoa, American trader Virginius Chapin who had been appointed Hawaiian commercial and consular agent by Wyllie in 1853, resigned his commission upon returning to the United States in late 1856, and nominated John Chauner Williams, a Tahiti-born British trader and son of London Missionary Society minister John Williams, as vice-commercial and consular agent to succeed him, while recommending his appointment as Hawaiian consul.⁷⁴ Eventually, however, another of St Julian’s close associates, Henry De Boos, was appointed as Hawaiian Consul to Sāmoa in 1859.⁷⁵ De Boos, an adventurer, former ship surgeon and trader whose brother Charles De Boos was one of St Julian’s fellow journalists at the Sydney Morning Herald, had earlier been appointed by St Julian and Reeve as attaché to the Hawaiian Commission and sent on a mission to Tonga and Sāmoa in order to deliver correspondence to King Tupou I and leading Samoan chiefs.⁷⁶ How long Henry De Boos maintained his consular position remains unclear as there is no further correspondence from him in the Hawaiian archives, and he is known to have returned to New South Wales where he later worked in various civil service positions.⁷⁷

Besides Tonga and Sāmoa, Fiji was the third major archipelago in the Southwestern Pacific that St Julian was interested in establishing Hawaiian diplomatic relations with—probably without anticipating in the 1850s that he would eventually live and die there himself. In 1857, he appointed another of his acquaintances, Robert Sherson Swanston as Hawaiian consul in that archipelago.⁷⁸ Swanston was a globetrotting adventurer, born in India to British colonial officials, who had spent time in North America, Sāmoa and Tasmania before settling down in Fiji in 1857, where he became one of the leading European traders.⁷⁹ His association with Hawai‘i turned out to be short-lived, however, as he resigned from the consular position in 1859 and preferred to serve an island ruler more directly when he associated himself with Fiji-based Tongan warlord ‘Enele Ma‘afu, as whose secretary and interpreter Swanston served from the 1860s onwards.⁸⁰ Eventually Swanston would play an important role in the Kingdom of Fiji in the early 1870s, once more alongside St Julian.

Settler Adventurism in Melanesia in the Name of Hawai‘i: The Order of Arossi

It was St Julian and Reeve and the members of their network of early Hawaiian consuls in the Southwestern Pacific, who created Hawai‘i’s first Royal Order in 1859. In order to understand its origins, however, it is necessary to go back to the year 1851 and the aforementioned voyage of Scottish entrepreneur and adventurer Benjamin Boyd from Hawai‘i to Australia through the Kingsmill Islands (now Kiribati) and the Solomons aboard his yacht Wanderer. After having failed to make a fortune in the California gold rush, Boyd intended to establish what he called a “Papuan Republic,” an independent state under his leadership somewhere in Melanesia, planning to emulate British adventurer Brooke’s scheme to establish himself as the Rajah of Sarawak in Borneo in 1841 and whose story had become legend among British imperialists.⁸¹

Among the Wanderer’s crew that consisted mainly of Australian Aborigines and Pacific Islanders was John Webster, a fellow Scotsman and brother of Alexander S. Webster. After initially living in Australia, John had settled in Hokianga in northern Aotearoa (New Zealand) where he was active in the timber industry, selling kauri wood through his brother’s firm to Australia.⁸² Like Boyd, J. Webster had been lured to California by the prospects of the gold rush, and Boyd took him aboard because of his knowledge of the Māori language that he hoped would be useful in conversing with Islanders to be encountered on their way.⁸³ Talented as an artist and writer, J. Webster produced dozens of drawings and sketches of landscapes, people and objects seen during the trip, as well as an account of the voyage that was later published in Sydney.⁸⁴

In order to build his “Papuan Republic,” Boyd allegedly made land-purchasing agreements with the inhabitants of two islands during the trip. On 25 August, he had Taano, high chief of the atoll of Sikaiana (Stewart Is.), a Polynesian outlier north of the Solomon Islands, and his son Faro, sign a contract ceding the atoll to him for merchandise worth $1,000.⁸⁵ A few weeks later, on 5 October, a similar document was allegedly signed by ten chiefs of the island of Makira (San Cristóbal) in the Solomon Islands, ceding their island to Boyd for goods worth $2,000.⁸⁶

Figure 6.

“Marau or Wanderer’s Bay, Island of San Christoval, Lat. 10° 34' S, Lon 161° 29' E,” 1851. Pencil drawing by John Webster. Auckland Museum, Auckland, New Zealand.

Sikaiana was a small society, consisting of a few hundred people with one language and a unified socio-political system,⁸⁷ and Taano appears to have been somewhat familiar with literacy as his name is written in an uneasy handwriting different from that of the contract. As a Polynesian language, Sikaianan is also closely enough related to Māori that Webster might have been able to serve as a rudimentary interpreter. Hence it may be possible that the people of Sikaiana understood the implications of the deal with Boyd, but it is remains nonetheless questionable and problematic. Makira, on the other hand, is more than a thousand times larger and consisted of multiple independent communities with different languages and cultures.⁸⁸ Claiming possession of that large landmass through the signing of a “cession” by a few community leaders in a few coastal villages appears no less than absurd.

Boyd, however, never came to reap whatever benefits he expected to derive from these problematic claims of land and sovereignty. At the Wanderer’s next stop on the island of Guadalcanal, he disappeared during a skirmish with the island’s inhabitants and was presumably killed by them.⁸⁹ As his main associate and lieutenant of the expedition, J. Webster took over the land claims for himself and subsequently claimed to be sovereign of both Sikaiana and Makira. After returning to Sydney, J. Webster contacted St Julian through his brother A. S. Webster, desiring to cede Sikaiana to the Hawaiian Kingdom, in the hope of getting himself appointed as the atoll’s governor or proprietor and thereby securing the claim under an internationally recognized government.⁹⁰ During the following years, after J. Webster had returned to Hokianga in Aotearoa, St Julian attempted to complete the annexation deal with Hawai‘i. It was ultimately approved by Kamehameha IV in 1856, with a provision to conduct a plebiscite among the Sikaianans to determine their consent to the deal—a progressive idea unheard of at the time, when the right of peoples to self-determination had not been formulated yet—but ultimately never implemented.⁹¹

After his return to Hokianga, John Webster, who had previously already ceded one half of his claim over the Island of Makira to St Julian in his personal capacity,⁹² also transferred the rest of his claim over Makira to St Julian, again through his brother Alexander as an intermediary as well as Charles De Boos as St Julian’s representative. Specifically, Webster agreed to keep the title “High Chief of Makira” while St Julian would bear the title of “Lord (Muara) of Arossi,” since the people of Western Makira are known as Arossi (modern spelling Arosi with a single s). Reeve, for his part, was granted the small island of Marau off the shore of the mainland of western Makira.⁹³ Webster eventually signed all his remaining claims to Sikaiana over to St Julian as well.⁹⁴

Under this title, St Julian subsequently created a fictional state-like entity resembling a medieval fiefdom, including feudal titles and arms for his subordinates.⁹⁵ In a January 1857 letter to Wyllie informing him of having acquired all right over Sikaiana from J. Webster, St Julian signed as “Charles, Muara of Arossi and Sovereign Chief of Sikyana [Sikaiana],” attached the seal of Arossi that he had created, containing a cross crosslet and the Latin motto “Ne tentes aut perfice” (Don’t try, unless you intend to accomplish it).⁹⁶ Similarly Reeve at times signed documents as “Edward Marau.”⁹⁷

It was out of this fantastic construction of a medieval fiefdoms grafted upon Melanesian communities who presumably had no clue about the entire venture, that an order for the Hawaiian Kingdom was created. The Commission in Sydney had repeatedly suggested the creation of a Hawaiian national order of merit, starting with a letter by Reeve to Wyllie written on Hawai‘i’s national holiday in 1854,⁹⁸ but no immediate action into this direction was forthcoming from Honolulu. In 1858, the three pretending “Oceanic Princes” St Julian (“Sovereign Chief of Arossi and Sikyana”), Reeve (“Sovereign Chief of Marau”) and James Potts Ormiston, another of St Julian’s associates who claimed the title of “sovereign chief of Ghela,”⁹⁹ drafted a declaration that they would constitute an Australian/Oceanian chapter of two revived medieval orders of chivalry, namely of the Order of the Knights Templar as well as the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, styled “The Most Eminent and Sovereign Order of St John of Oceanie.”¹⁰⁰ Apparently this move was not further pursued, but instead it morphed into the formation of an independent order of chivalry under the sovereignty of the Hawaiian King.

In August 1859, the Order of Arossi, named after St Julian’s claimed fiefdom on Makira, was formally constituted, with St Julian acting as the order’s Grand Commander, John Webster and Edward Reeve as Commanders, Ormiston as Associate and Archivist of the order, and Alexander Blake, Henry De Boos, William Knight and Alexander S. Webster as officers. The motivation for the foundation of the order was that:

[…] it has become manifestly expedient that an Order of merit should be established for the reward of those who may in any way have materially aided the Social or Political advancement of any Polynesian Government or Peoples and [that] it is also most expedient and fitting that the Sovereignty of such order be vested in his […] Majesty the King of the Hawaiian Islands and in his successors not only on account of his and their superior dignity and power but because the Monarchy of the Hawaiian Islands is the only Polynesian monarchy which has, as yet, obtained international and universal recognition.¹⁰¹

A short, six-paragraph constitution was printed on a broadsheet, later more elaborated by St Julian on sixty manuscript pages.¹⁰² The insignia of the order was a cross crosslet, apparently influenced by the medieval cross of Jerusalem, with the Latin motto Ne tentes aut perfice that St Julian had already used as a seal for his fantasy state of Arossi. As in other graded orders of merit the insignia’s coloring and metal content varied according to rank. Kamehameha IV was offered the position of Sovereign of the order, to which he assented in early 1860 as related at the beginning of this article.

Figure 7.

Insignia of Grand Commander of the Order of Arossi, worn by Charles St Julian. Golden-colored metal, blue enamel, colored ribbon. Latin inscription, “ne tentes aut perfice,” on top. Produced ca. 1860. St Julian family papers, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

As important as its status as the first Hawaiian royal order should be for the history of the Hawaiian Kingdom, not much was heard of the Order of Arossi afterwards. Apparently, no other appointments were made besides its eight foundational members, and within a few years the order was largely forgotten in Honolulu, as there was no further mention of it in diplomatic correspondence. The only known depiction of the insignia being worn is an image of Reeve published in the Sydney Illustrated News in 1871 (fig. 8). The only known surviving insignia, St Julian’s as a Grand Commander, is kept as part of the St Julian family papers in the Mitchell Library in Sydney.¹⁰³ In the sense of fulfilling its motto, the Order of Arossi was thus clearly a failure. The same, however, cannot be said about the Hawaiian diplomatic network created by St Julian and Reeve, which would have a second phase of growth and activity a decade later.

Figure 8.

Portrait of Edward Reeve wearing the insignia of Commander of the Order of Arossi. Engraving published in the Illustrated Sydney News, July 10, 1871, based on a photograph or sketch done between 1859 and 1871. Engraver and photographer unknown.

Extension of the Network in the 1870s and 1880s

After a hiatus of very little diplomatic action in the region during the 1860s, the second active phase of Hawaiian diplomacy in the 1870s saw the network reinvigorated and further extended. After Kamehameha V and Harris gave St Julian and Reeve a new boost in 1871, Hawaiian consular positions that had lapsed were refilled. For instance, in Auckland, John W. Bain, originally appointed independently of St Julian’s circle, but having occasionally communicated with Honolulu through the Sydney office in the 1850s,¹⁰⁴ had died in 1867, leaving that office vacant. In late 1870, Kamehameha V appointed merchant Andrew Wardrop to succeed Bain, with St Julian being involved in the appointment process.¹⁰⁵ Wardrop was frequently absent, however, and after his resignation, Kamehameha V appointed another local merchant, James Cruickshank, as the new consul in 1872.¹⁰⁶ Hawai‘i seemed out of luck with its consuls in Auckland, as Cruickshank also left after less than a year, appointing his brother and business partner David Boosie Cruickshank as acting consul,¹⁰⁷ a position the latter exercised for several years until formally commissioned by Kalākaua after his brother James’ death in 1878.¹⁰⁸ In the Australian colonies, George N. Oakley and Ernest Augustus White were appointed as vice-consuls in Melbourne and Newcastle, respectively, in 1872.¹⁰⁹ Later in the 1870s, railway financier and local politician Audley Coote became the late William Knight’s successor as Hawaiian consul in Hobart in 1878.¹¹⁰

St Julian also took care in reviving the Hawaiian consulate in Fiji. In early 1871, he appointed D’Arcy Wentworth Lathrop Murray to fill the position vacated by Robert Swanston eleven years earlier.¹¹¹ Murray had been a journalist, newspaper editor and local politician in Tasmania and decided to settle in Levuka at the time. In Fiji, he continued both occupations, becoming a member of the legislature of the Fijian Kingdom, as well as an editor of the local English-language newspapers Fiji Gazette and Central Polynesian and Fiji Argus.¹¹² Shortly thereafter, his Sydney-based brother Pembroke Lathrop Murray, a literary and military figure, was appointed first as attaché and vice-consul by St Julian in 1872, and then as chancellor of the consulate-general by Reeve in 1873.¹¹³

The 1870s also saw the creation of new consular positions. In early 1871, merchant and local politician Henry Driver was appointed consul in Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand, an important port city in which one of the main steamship companies serving the Pacific was headquartered.¹¹⁴ St Julian was involved in Driver’s appointment, as he was responsible for delivering to him his consular seal.¹¹⁵ Another new consulate was opened in Brisbane, Queensland, in 1878, with H. A. Thompson serving as the first consul.¹¹⁶ In Fiji, D. W. L. Murray passed away in 1876, two years after British colonization, and subsequently another former official in the Fijian Kingdom, George Austin Woods, suggested during a visit to Honolulu to restructure the Hawaiian consular office in Fiji as one covering also Tonga and Sāmoa while himself applying for the position. It appears that his advice was not followed, as no further consular appointment for Fiji has been documented.¹¹⁷

When Reeve was forced to resign his commission as consul-general in 1879, Alexander Speed Webster, the last other surviving member of the original consular network from the 1850s, succeeded him in office.¹¹⁸ Being a businessman rather than an intellectual like Reeve, Webster’s handling of Hawaiian government business was more practically-minded than visionary. Most of his extensive correspondence with Honolulu refers to day-to-day matters, and the only new appointments he made were those of other local businessmen in already established consulates in Australia.¹¹⁹ Nonetheless, as one of the surviving “Arossians,” he likely had some deeper interests in connections with Hawai‘i, and among his correspondence with Honolulu’s foreign ministry is a detailed letter explaining everything about the order of Arossi he had learnt from his brother, Reeve, and St Julian.¹²⁰

Interest for the history of St Julian’s older initiatives was great in Honolulu at the time, because Webster’s tenure as consul-general coincided with the first years of the intensification of Hawai‘i’s Pan-Oceanian policy under King Kalākaua and foreign minister Walter Murray Gibson that lasted from 1882 to 1887.¹²¹ During a business trip to Honolulu, Webster further conferred with Gibson who subsequently published an extensive article on the Order of Arossi in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser.¹²² Unfortunately, however, Webster did not return to Sydney after leaving Hawai‘i and resigned his commission. The consulate-general was passed on to Ernest Augustus Smith, a businessman with much less personal interest in Hawai‘i who also held other consulships simultaneously.¹²³

With the resignations of Reeve in 1879 and Webster in 1884, the last members of the Order of Arossi were gone from Hawai‘i’s diplomatic service. In consequence, Sydney ceased to have any central role in coordinating Hawaiian diplomacy in Oceania after 1884. When in late 1886 King Kalākaua intensified his efforts into this direction and sent a Hawaiian legation consisting of ‘Ōiwi diplomats John Edwin Bush and Henry French Poor and their retinue to Sāmoa, the consulate-general in Sydney was not involved.¹²⁴ However, as part of Kalākaua’s and Gibson’s policy to further extend Hawai‘i’s global diplomatic network, one more new consulate in the Australian colonies was opened in June 1887 when lawyer and politician George T. Collins was appointed Hawaiian vice consul in Launceston, the second-largest city in Tasmania.¹²⁵

Serving the Hawaiian Kingdom in Oceania

The members of Hawai‘i’s early diplomatic network in the Southwest Pacific, and particularly those of the first generation who were members of the Order of Arossi, made important contributions to the Hawaiian Kingdom as well as to other island nations in nineteenth-century Oceania. Most well know are, of course, the results of St Julian’s work: As an early visionary of a federation of independent Island kingdoms, he authored the first constitutional draft for Sāmoa in 1854, attempted to have the Hawaiian kingdom extended south of the equator by arranging for the annexation of Sikaiana, was one of the major foreign advisors of Tonga’s first king George Tupou I throughout the 1850s, and in the 1870s became one of the important actors in the creation and governance of the Kingdom of Fiji under Cakobau. In that latter capacity he also assisted Cakobau’s son Ratu Josefa Celua who was studying in Sydney in the early 1870s.¹²⁶ In Tonga, St Julian remains remembered for his advocacy of government reform, while his most important legacy in Fiji was his firm stance, together with Cakobau’s chief secretary John B. Thurston, on preserving Fijian land rights during the annexation negotiations with the British.¹²⁷

Most histories of Tonga mention the model character of the Hawaiian constitution for that of Tonga, which George Tupou I enacted in 1875, and credit St Julian for initiating the connection between the two Polynesian kingdom that led to this institutional transfer.¹²⁸ However, St Julian can only be credited for starting the dialogue, as his life ended in 1874. It was left to Reeve to provide Tupou I’s chief advisor Shirley W. Baker during a visit to Sydney with a copy of the then current Hawaiian constitution of 1864, which Baker then used as a basis for the 1875 Tongan constitution.¹²⁹ In the absence of a Hawaiian consul in Tonga after Blake’s death in the early 1860s, Reeve subsequently served as an intermediary between Hawai‘i and Tonga.¹³⁰ Reeve also played an important role in negotiating the 1874 postal convention between the Hawaiian Kingdom and the colony of New South Wales,¹³¹ the first and only international agreement Hawai‘i made with an Australian colony.¹³²

Of importance for Hawai‘i’s domestic history, St Julian and Webster were also involved in recruiting Sydney architect Thomas Rowe to design Ali‘iolani Hale, the intended new palace for Kamehameha V that eventually became the Hawaiian Kingdom’s government building.¹³³

While little is known about Pembroke L. Murray’s role in helping Reeve and Webster in the legation and consulate-general in Sydney, his brother D. W. L. Murray played a crucial role in conveying Hawaiian support to the burgeoning Fijian government of King Cakobau between 1871 and 1874. As a local newspaper editor, government printer and member of Fiji’s legislative assembly, Murray provided the copy of the Hawaiian constitution that was used as a basis for Fiji’s own constitution in 1871,¹³⁴ of which Murray subsequently had an English translation printed.¹³⁵ Murray’s continuing loyalty to Hawai‘i’s pan-Oceanian political project was once more displayed in the face of imminent British takeover of Fiji in 1874, when he informed Cakobau’s cabinet “that any little influence I may be supposed to possess or any assistance I can offer you at this important juncture of affairs, is entirely, as it has ever been, at your disposal,”¹³⁶ Murray also composed a detailed report showcasing deceptive British attitudes and policies, which was published in Honolulu.¹³⁷

While the mentioned high-level government relations produced most of the archival records, we should not forget the important

Figure 9.

Portrait photograph of D’Arcy Wentworth Lathrop Murray (1828–1876), n.d. Photographer unknown. Parliament of Tasmania Members Biographical Database, Tasmanian Parliamentary Library, Australia.

services the Hawaiian consuls provided to their country on a more day-to-day level and more often than not creating no written records, namely helping Hawaiian sailors on ships calling in port cities or working there. In the nineteenth century, thousands of Pacific Islanders worked on Western ships, and many if not most of them came from the Hawaiian Islands.¹³⁸ Many Hawaiians also worked overseas in various parts of the Pacific Rim.¹³⁹ On occasion however, helping them became more complex, involving other governments for instance, and did generate a paper trail in the archives. One such example was when on his way home to Sydney from Fiji in November 1874, Reeve stopped on Norfolk Island where he was approached by Henry Pilikani, a Hawaiian sailor who had been ill-treated by a ship captain and taken refuge on the island. In his capacity as Hawaiian consul-general, Reeve wrote to Fletcher Christian Nobbs, chief magistrate of the small self-governing British colony (i.e. the equivalent of premier in larger colonies), advising him to grant Pilikani protection and refuse requests by the captain to take him back aboard his ship.¹⁴⁰

The last important service provided to the Hawaiian Kingdom by one of its consuls in the Southwestern Pacific was during the fateful month of January 1893. The Consul in Auckland, D. B. Cruickshank, was certainly much less personally committed to Hawai‘i than his aforementioned colleagues, as he was concurrently also consul for France and Chile,¹⁴¹ and later had no qualms swearing allegiance to the Dole regime after the overthrow of the Hawaiian government.¹⁴² Yet he did Queen Lili‘uokalani a crucial service by receiving her protest against the US role in the overthrow by steamer and delivering it to the authorities in Auckland so that it could be fed into British telegraphic cable system and arrived within a few hours in England and the United States in order to balance the one-sided propaganda spread by the Queen’s enemies.¹⁴³

Conclusion: An Enduring Legacy of Hawaiian Diplomacy

The foundation of Hawai‘i’s first order upon dubious land claims in Melanesia remained a marginal eccentricity of the founding circle of Hawai‘i’s representatives in the Southwestern Pacific that was by far overshadowed by the many more tangible services they provided to the Hawaiian Kingdom. In due course, the most prominent of them were rewarded for those services by Hawai‘i’s monarchs by being conferred other, subsequently established, Hawaiian royal orders. In 1872, Charles St Julian was appointed Knight Commander of the Royal Order of Kamehameha by Kamehameha V,¹⁴⁴ and Edward Reeve was made a Knight’s Commander of the Royal Order of Kalākaua in 1878.¹⁴⁵ Kalākaua also conferred the rank of Knight’s Commander of the Order of Kamehameha upon Alexander S. Webster in 1883.¹⁴⁶ In 1887, Audley Coote in Tasmania received Knight’s Commander of the Royal Order of Kalākaua.¹⁴⁷ Finally, Queen Lili‘uokalani made Ernest O. Smith a Commander of the Royal Order of the Crown of Hawai‘i in 1892.¹⁴⁸

Even if doubts can be raised about the commitment to Hawai‘i of many individuals in its consular service, for St Julian and Reeve at least it seems beyond doubt, and no ulterior motives for them to accept their diplomatic positions are evident. In contrast to many of his predecessors and successors who were primarily businessmen, St Julian went through insolvency twice, so he certainly did not gain financially from his Hawaiian position. Reeve seemed to have somewhat more of financial stability, as he was a government employee in his capacity as museum curator and later police magistrate, but there is also no evidence that he ever benefited in any way financially from his Hawaiian appointments.

Reeve’s deep passion and patriotism for Hawai‘i was also evident during the difficult reign of Lunalilo and Charles R. Bishop’s tenure in the Hawaiian foreign office. Faced with a sudden lack of support from Honolulu, Reeve made it clear that he understood his loyalty to be to the Hawaiian nation and its ideals, and that he would not merely be a recipient of orders from superiors if they contradicted those ideals. Bishop’s closure of the Hawaiian Legation to Southern Polynesia deeply offended Reeve, who called it a “suicidal” move for Hawai‘i. Since his pleas to Bishop went unheard, he unsuccessfully attempted to transfer his pan-Oceanian commitment to Tonga, and discussed with the Tongan King’s chief advisor Shirley Baker about restructuring his Sydney office as a Tongan, rather than Hawaiian legation or even moving to Tonga to become a co-advisor to King Tupou.¹⁴⁹

After support for his pan-Pacific activism was renewed under King Kalākaua but he was forced to resign because of a change in British government policy, Reeve emphasized to Foreign Minister John Mākini Kapena that he was resigning his commission most reluctantly and only because he needed his employment as a police magistrate to support his family.¹⁵⁰ Even afterwards, he communicated with Kapena “privately” to share what was going on in the Pacific region. It also appears that he continued to receive visitors from Hawai‘i all the way to his remote residence in Gosford, as a late 20th century archaeological excavation unearthed an 1883 Hawaiian silver coin in that area that is quite far away from the busy port of Sydney.¹⁵¹ Reeve’s appreciation of his Hawaiian appointments was evident even in his will, in which he listed the insignia of the Royal Order of Kalākaua and his Hawaiian commission and exequatur as his most important possessions to be inherited by his descendants, before his family heirlooms brought from England.¹⁵²

The most lasting legacy of Hawai‘i’s early consular network, perhaps, was left in Tonga, both institutionally and personally. The Tongan constitution of 1875—a long-term consequence of St Julian’s correspondence with Tupou I in the 1850s and a more immediate consequence of consultations between Reeve and Shirley Baker in 1873—is still in existence today in amended form, making Tonga the only island state where a derivate of the nineteenth-century Hawaiian political system still operates.¹⁵³ Furthermore, Hawai‘i’s consul Alexander Blake, who played an important role as an intermediary between St Julian and Tupou I, left an important family heritage in Tonga: Among his many descendants there today are none less than the current king Tupou VI and his predecessor, the late George Tupou V, who are both great-great-great-grandsons of Blake.¹⁵⁴

While many of these legacies and achievements of Hawai‘i’s consular network in the Southwest Pacific are certainly worth celebrating, there are also problematic aspects in the behavior of the people involved that deserve a more critical evolution. The obvious concern for Oceanian people that was displayed by St Julian and Reeve on many occasions was mixed with aspects of more typical white settler adventurism on others. While being agents and supporters of the anti-imperialist pan-Oceanian coalition building by the Hawaiian Kingdom, St Julian, Reeve and their circle were uncritically participating in British settler colonialism and the displacement of aboriginal people in Australia. Whereas I have found no statement by Reeve on Australian Aborigines at all—but I would interpret that silence as consent to the overall policy of both the British imperial and the colonial New South Wales governments—St Julian either wrote or at least approved of a problematic passage in an 1853 book on the resources of New South Wales that he co-published with a certain Edward K. Silvester. That passage in the book’s introduction stated that “as in other quarters of the globe, the wild aboriginal inhabitants give way before the civilized races of the world” while the book otherwise treats Aborigines as part of the natural rather than cultural landscape of the colony.¹⁵⁵ Contrary to common assumptions however, recent research has shown that Aborigines remained indeed a visible part of society in the Sydney area during the entire 19th century.¹⁵⁶

More actively involved in colonization and displacement of indigenous people, John Webster—whose association with his brother and St Julian’s circle in Sydney enabled the formation of the Order of Arossi in the first place—participated first in frontier violence against Aborigines in Australia and then in the colonization of the Ngāpuhi and Te Rarawa people of Hokianga in Aotearoa, where he firmly sided with pro-British factions during the New Zealand wars of resistance of the 1840s and 1860s.¹⁵⁷ And of course, the “Arossi” scheme itself derived from the ruthless settler-adventurism in the Solomons of Ben Boyd, who at the time was already infamous for his exploitation of Melanesian laborers in Australia in the late 1840s.¹⁵⁸

This seemingly contradictory attitude of people like St Julian and Reeve exemplifies the prevailing behavior of many Europeans at the time: There was a difference in attitudes towards the lighter-skinned Polynesians (including, to some extent, Micronesians as well as Fijians, despite their darker physical features) who were seen as “noble savages” and closer to Europeans, on one hand, and the darker skinned Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians, seen as more primitive and less human “ignoble savages” on the other.¹⁵⁹ Hence, proudly serving the Hawaiian, Tongan and Fijian Kingdoms and being genuinely concerned with the welfare of those kingdoms’ native inhabitants while simultaneously ignoring the displacement of Aborigines in Australia and uncritically inheriting an absurd settler-adventurer land claim on Makira in the Solomons from Ben Boyd apparently posed no problems for either St Julian or Reeve.¹⁶⁰

Secondly, it is striking that not only all the mentioned officeholders, but also virtually all persons mentioned in their correspondence were men. This contrasted with the continuing important role of women in the Hawaiian Kingdom, where for instance Kamehameha IV’s widow Queen Dowager Emma Kaleleonālani ran against Kalākaua when a successor to Lunalilo was elected in 1874, or where Emma Metcalf Nakuina served as curatrix of the Hawaiian National Museum during the 1880s.¹⁶¹ British settler society in Australia, on the other hand, was much more pronouncedly patriarchal, which was reflected in the attitudes of the Hawaiian diplomats. Their wives, for instance, are rarely mentioned at all. The only exception appears to be Blake, whose wife Matelita Fusilango‘ia Tangulu came from a chiefly family, and played an important role independently of him, given that Tongan society was also less patriarchal than its British counterpart.¹⁶² Worth mentioning is also a small gesture by Reeve, unusually progressive for his time, to make his wife Catherine the executrix of his will, crossing out the male-gendered formula “executor” in the pre-printed form.¹⁶³

Lastly, it must be regretted that the correspondence, visions and actions of the members of Hawai‘i’s consular network in the Southwestern Pacific were out of touch with the mainstream of Hawaiian society, which was overwhelmingly ‘Ōiwi and Hawaiian-language speaking at the time. The entire network was an English-only operation, and it appears that no Hawaiian translations of any of St Julian’s or Reeve’s materials were ever produced, nor that any of the articles referred to in Honolulu’s then rather marginal, low circulation, English-language press were mirrored in the much more widely read Hawaiian-language press. The only exception seems to be a small notice mentioning St Julian’s honorary membership in the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society.¹⁶⁴ I have not seen any other mention of his name in Hawaiian-language newspapers.

However, this might be partly based on a technical selection bias. The English-language Hawaiian press during the Kingdom is for the most part fully digitized through Optical Character Recognition and thus fully searchable,¹⁶⁵ whereas the Hawaiian-language newspapers have only partially been made word searchable and most of the digital database consists of photographic scans only.¹⁶⁶ Browsing all Hawaiian-language newspapers from the 1850s to the 1880s for reference to Hawaiian diplomacy in the Southwestern Pacific would be a monumental task, beyond my capacities during the research for this article, but an important undertaking for further research in the future.

Noticeable however, is that Reeve later did learn some Hawaiian words, occasionally adding “Ke ku [sic] Akua e malama [i] ke alii”¹⁶⁷or “E ola ka Moi Kalakaua e[sic] ke Akua Mana Loa”¹⁶⁸ or simply “Aloha”¹⁶⁹ to his dispatches—a feature exceedingly rare among the overwhelmingly English-only consular correspondence in the Hawaiian archives.

Nonetheless, despite all the shortcomings and problematic aspects, the pioneer role of St Julian and Reeve and their network needs to be appreciated, as it laid some of the intellectual and institutional groundwork for the wider pan-Oceanian project that King Kalākaua and his circle of supporters such as John Mākini Kapena, Walter Murray Gibson, Robert Hoapili Baker, Joseph Sykes Webb, John Edward Bush and Henry French Poor, to name a few of its most important agents, would start implementing in the 1880s, including a direct personal continuity in the person of A. S. Webster. The late Fijian scholar Tracey Banivanua-Mar certainly appreciated the role played by the Hawaiian Kingdom and its diplomatic agents like St Julian in fostering pan-Oceanian awareness and resistance against Western colonialism during the nineteenth century and thereby contributing to the intellectual history of decolonization in the Pacific in the longue durée.¹⁷⁰ The motto Ne tentes aut perfice, if inappropriate for the fantastic order, was indeed well-chosen for the Hawaiian consular network in Oceania.